Dr Douglas Booker

Personal statement:

I am a geographer and entrepreneur, with a focus on indoor air quality and environmental justice. My research uses qualitative and quantitative methods, including air quality monitoring, citizen science, and relational approaches to understanding social practice.

I am a UKRI Regional Clean Air Champion as part of the SPF Clean Air Programme. In this role I help to bring together research across engineering, atmospheric, medical, and social science to develop practical and fair solutions for air quality challenges. I also run NAQTS, a Lancaster Environment Centre collocated business that develops tools and technologies to provide holistic indoor air quality information.

Key topic areas of research or interest:

1. Indoor air quality (IAQ) and environmental justice: I am interested in a variety of environmental justice focused approaches to improving IAQ, including uncovering unequal distributions of IAQ, but also looking at the social, political, and economic mechanisms through which unequal distributions of poor IAQ are created and sustained.
2. IAQ and energy: IAQ and energy are often portrayed as a dichotomy as strategies to improve energy efficiency can exacerbate IAQ. I am interested in understanding how this dichotomy manifests, and how approaches to mitigate injustices in the energy and air quality spheres can coalesce.

Publications:

Ten questions concerning the future of residential indoor air quality and its environmental justice implications: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360132325004391

A critical air quality science perspective on citizen science in action: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13549839.2022.2118700. Local Environment.

Unstable air: How COVID-19 remade knowing air quality in school classrooms: https://ephemerajournal.org/contribution/unstable-air-how-covid-19-remade-knowing-air-quality-school-classrooms. Ephemera.

Breathing in the polyrhythmic city: A spatiotemporal, rhythmanalytic account of urban air pollution and its inequalities: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2399654420948871. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space.

Still breathing unequally? Inequalities in urban air pollution within transitions to a post-carbon society: https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/post-carbon-inclusion. Post-Carbon Inclusion: Transitions Built on Justice.